I never said there was no connection between them - that was a straw man you've built up and knocked down quit successfuly.
You said "they have nothing to do with each other". If you can't carry on a cohesive argument, I won't reply further. Quit dancing around and take a shot at me, damn!
ID claims that it can answer the origin of life.
Depending on who you ask, typicall it is only the origin of life on earth. Abiogenesis would be an adequate explanation for life everywhere in the universe. If you want to talk about life in the universe, and a universal creator, then you quit comparing ID to evolution and start comparing it to the big bang theory, because evolution doesn't really explain how the universe got here.
There are many experiments that have tested the theories around QM - see the light-through-a-slit experiments for example which you can do in any high-school science lab. There is still a lot of work surrounding QM because it doesn't fit in with the Einsteinian theory of gravity - ie. there's something missing in our understanding of the universe. Investigating things like this is what science is all about.
According to QM, I could teleport across the universe right now, the chances of that are slim, impossible according to the law of probability, but... that is abiogenesis for you, impossible according to the law of probability. As for the double-slit experiment, it raised more questions than it answered.
I love your matter-of-fact tone, everything you say, even things like "just pointing out that there is no organised movement to interfere with religion by any significant faction of science or scientists", which is completely unfounded. "The converse is not true with a politically significant faction of religious people trying to interfere with science by redefining it to be something its not." I've demonstrated that ID can be falsified using statistics alone, so from my perspective ID proponents are contributing to the realm of science by proposing alternate viewpoints. Interfering with science, that's bullshit, this is a political matchup, as you're well aware. One side uses science as often as it can, the science of being gay, the science of marijuana joints having medical value, whatever, just a bunch of politicians and lawyers trying to get their way if you ask me.
Darwin actually based his theory of evolution on the assumption that god created the first replicator, it may have demonstrated the bias of the time, but none the less, he found the "warm little pond" to be unlikely. I was talking statistics with someone else, you can look at my recent posts to find it, Mathematics will not support the theory of abiogenesis.
I have no doubt that evolution takes place. At some point in time, people began to accept the warm little pond idea, and championed Darwin for it, but Darwin may have been more skeptical of that if he were still around. He didn't set out to disprove god. I don't see anything in the article argueing against evolution, it just states that evolution doesn't explain the origin of life. I distinctly remember my 7th grade biology teacher having an in-class discussion where he made the claim that life "evolved" from primordial goo. Maybe he was not the best teacher, but you see what is really the issue, who's pushing an agenda?
As per your comments, I don't think it is a philosophical argument, ID, it is a scientific one, which is based on observable phenomena. If you were to lay out a philosophical argument for ID, it would probably go something like this (pardon my lack of decent argument structure):
All life on earth which exists in its present form is based on DNA, which requires RNA, and other cell components (summary)
(some huge number) chance of random occurance
According to the law of probability, this is an impossibility
Alternative is that life was constructed at some point, or existed at the formation of the universe, undefined probability.
Is that good enough? Fiddle with the numbers and make random occurance a possibility, and you've shot my argument to hell, or present a possible alternative to random chance. As for the huge number, the number is agreeably large from all the sources I've read, the argument against this is that earth was around for so long enough, with enough diversity in the geology and what not, to provision this random occurance. I can't even speculate the number, but I would hope you agree that it is incredibly slim chances that life evolved on EARTH of all places! Perhaps it happened once, somewhere in the universe, billions, trillions of years ago, and we are just an extension of that civilization. At least that is more probable than the random occurance happening on Earth, but that is a fine explanation for the events described in the Bible if you ask me (people descending from the heavens and what not). I think the Bible is interesting, but I wouldn't consider myself a religious person.
It's strange that these opinions go completely ignored by the scientific community. Here are the interesting parts:
DIFFICULTIES FOR ABIOGENESIS
The previous discussions has shown that there is no special symmetry about life forming DNA or protein that
causes that proper DNA or protein sequences to form spontaneously. In addition, there is apparently no special
feature in nature that causes DNA or protein structures suited for self-replication to form spontaneously, even in an
environment which has energy flowing through it. Thus, it appears that the only natural mechanism left for naturally
producing the proper DNA or protein sequences for the 1st replicator is just the pure chance of them forming through
random intermingling in a prebiotic soup. This section discusses some of the major difficulties in developing a nucleic
acid based cell.
he goes on to site a bunch of specific necessities, with a number of individual estimates that need to be factored into any final calculation. I skimmed over it and didn't see any ridiculously huge numbers, it's almost pointless to slap a number on it, but none the less, there is a number out there...
I can't find many non-religious sources, funny how this area goes completely ignored by mainstream science, there aren't even any rebuttals!
http://intelligentdesign.org/odds/odds.htm
Dr. Emile Borel who first formulated the basic Law of Probability which states that the occurrence of an event where the chances are beyond 1 chance in 1050(the 200th power is used for scientific calculations), is an event which we can state with certainty will never happen, regardless of the time allotted or how many opportunities could exist for the event to take place.
...
Francis Crick, the man who shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins for their discovery of the molecular structure of DNA had this to say about probability factors and protein synthesis:
" To produce this miracle of molecular construction all the cell need do is to string together the amino acids (which make up the polypeptide chain) in the correct order. This is a complicated biochemical process, a molecular assembly line, using instructions in the form of a nucleic acid tape (the so-called messenger RNA). Here we need only ask, how many possible proteins are there? If a particular amino acid sequence was selected by chance, how rare of an event would that be?
This is an easy exercise in combinatorials. Suppose the chain is about two hundred amino acids long; this is , if anything, rather less than the average length of proteins of all types. Since we have just twenty possibilities at each place, the number of possibilities is twenty multiplied by itself some two hundred times. This is conveniently written 20 200, that is a one followed by 260 zeros!
This number is quite beyond our everyday comprehension. For comparison, consider the number of fundamental particles (atoms, speaking loosely) in the entire visible universe, not just in our own galaxy with its 1011 stars, but in all the billions of galaxies, out to the limits of observable space. This number, which is estimated to be 1080, is quite paltry by comparison to 10260. Moreover, we have only considered a polypeptide chain of a rather modest length. Had we considered longer ones as well, the figure would have been even more immense.(Life Itself, its origin and nature, Francis Crick, 1981, pp 51-52)
I should mention here that Crick is not a creationist, but his probability numbers for protein synthesis are similar to those of creation scientists.
So there you go, lower estimates in the 1 in 10^200,000 range. A more reasonable estimate would probably be 1 in 10^200,000,000
So personally I think if this happened anywhere in the universe, it was sheer luck that it happened at all, and more likely that the creator-god created us, or at least spawned us from his own, random chance DNA line. I lends serious credibility to the universal designer theory.
"I don't know how it could have happened without design, so it must have been designed"
You could say the same thing about abiogenesis. "I don't know how it could have happened except at random, just one of those 1 in 10^9218891287491824 chance that everything falls into place at random." I'd like to see someone try and compute the odds of life starting at random. Check this out, I googled for this: The Odds
Got something more substantial than just saying that you don't understand it?
I referenced a book. There are many other books on the subject. I've read that one in particular, it was interesting but what I really got from the book was the vastness of unanswered questions on the subject.
By the way, I've never heard of the discovery institute. Intelligent Design has been around for centuries, wasn't it Thomas Aquainas who first rationalized it? Plato also talked about it in Timaeus, but both philosphers were referring to a universal creator, here we're talking about the design of life forms, Plato knew nothing about DNA, Aquinas came closer to what we're talking about, however he had no understanding of life's intricacies either.
Who cares what internal memoranda the Discovery institute passes around. It sounds like they were talking more about sociology, social issues. I think whoever wrote that link you sited makes a lot of sense, regardless of their intent, like I said they didn't invent ID, it's been around for centuries, but a few of the points they make hit home with me; "The social consequences of materialism have been devastating..." I often see science used as a justification for detrimental practices, there is a lot of scientists trying to say marijuana is safe, which may lead to more widespread acceptance, hoever I think more drugs are the last thing society needs. Some people think religion is the worst thing that ever happened to us. It's hard to say since religion has been so prevalent from the beginning of time. I tend to think we would have destroyed ourselves by now if there weren't the influence of religion guiding some people.
Darwin refers to a "warm little pond", I went after the source of this:
Charles Darwin is often credited with having anticipated the modern chemical evolution scenario, based on ideas he expressed privately in a letter to Joseph Hooker in 1871.
`It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine (sic) compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were found.'
Of course, this quotation is only from a private letter. In his public writings, Darwin made reference to the activity of the Creator initiating life. The general view seems to be that Darwin was making a public statement which he was not fully committed to. Thus, Orgel wrote:
`Darwin, bending somewhat to the religious biases of his time, posited in the final paragraph of The Origin of Species that "the Creator" originally breathed life "into a few forms or into one." Then evolution took over: "From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." In private correspondence, however, he suggested life could have arisen through chemistry, "in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc. present".'(Orgel L.E., `The Origin of Life on the Earth', Scientific American, October 1994, p.53).
I suppose that explains the link between evolution and abiogenesis. It's interesting that Darwin used creationism as a foundation for his theory of evolution.
And in what way can it be presented without using anything supernatural?... how did they come about?
It is not an answer to everything, simply a disproof of the primordial soup theory. Evolution doesn't answer ALL the questions either though. Perhaps the answer to your question would best be solved through astronomy, or astrophysics. We still don't know where the Universe came from. People who tend to believe life happened at random may also be inclined to believe that the Universe came about for the same reason: none at all. Now purpose, that is a philosophical debate.
Evolution does not explain how life 'erupted' out of the oceans billions of years ago, that is abiogenesis. I don't see how this is such a hard concept to grasp
Are you seriously going to keep repeating this? Go read some of the other posts in this thread and see what everyone is talking about. Holy shit, you might as well be saying "relativity and quantum mechanics have nothing to do with each other". Speaking of which, is quantum mechanics falsifiable? Someone comes up with a huge complex set of equations that happen to work with each other, and it is widely accepted (after years of rejection). Some of it doesn't even make sense!
f someone had a 'biology' book with a section dedicated to creationism then it wouldn't be a biology book anymore - it'd be a religious text. That's what normal rational people get so upset about...
I'm glad you'd consider yourself a normal, rational person, but you may very well be an idiot, if you honestly believe that creationism is religious dogma. RTFA, the text is not referring to any literal truth, nor does it mention ANYTHING about religion! Holy shit man. And if you think scientists aren't trying to impose their beliefs on people, then you truly are an idiot, as I suspected. They may as well just throw every science journal together into one massive book and call it the bible, cause you'd just take it as the word of god wouldn't you?
I think the attitude you have is the simplest way of discrediting it, while many other theories need to be disproven with an alternative, like if I were to show you proof that every species you know was created by a traveling race of intelligent beings, it would throw evolution right out the window. I can't simply prove that evolution doesn't happen, because I would have to test it for an infinite period of time to be sure.
You need to understand exactly what a theory is, from a philosophical perspective. If I wanted to, I could claim that nothing, not even your own knowledge of yourself, is real knowledge, because it is based on observations you make as a human, which are subject to error. You're taking a similarly radical position when you claim that ID is not falsifiable. In this case you do the best you can to come to a rational conclusion, and many of the foundational questions in science have been answered with weak arguments. You go ask a true skeptic about either of the two topics and he/she will tell you there are two many unknowns at this point, to come to a solid conclusion, whichever side you take. There are a lot of good books on the subject, The Emergence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview, The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup, I've read the latter and recommend it, the former is next on my hit list.
Second, there are currently no scientific theories that explain the development of life as well as evolution does. It is the most widely accepted theory by a huge margin.
Abiogenesis is about the origin of life. Evolution, technically, is about what happened after life arose on Earth. Life origins studies proceed under a number of hypotheses and remain very tentative during this early period of investigation. A recent summary of research is in The Spark of Life : Darwin and the Primeval Soup by Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada.
Thirdly, the issue here is that they want to teach religion in a science class to further their ideological goals. Inteligent Design should not be given 'fair weight' in a scientific context, as it has nothing but the slimmest scientific backing.
Ahem! I don't hear anything about religion in their wording. It appears as though they are careful not to introduce religion. I find it strange that people make such a huff about this. Abiogenesis is an extremely raw topic, and right now I think Intelligent Design is just about the ONLY theory that makes sense. Primordial goo doesn't make much sense to me, and the research is really incomplete on the primordial goo hypothesis. Read the book.
Look, who's imposing their views on who here? What's the definition of "natural"? And why are the science books so sure that life spontaneously erupted out of nowhere? I had a discussion about this in the last ID topic, and I heard from a lot of people that evolution and abiogenesis were two completely separte things and that the two shouldn't be mixed. But this is what I'm talking about, why are they being mixed in with evolution? Evolution doesn't explain the origin of life? It's nice to see this being brought up, that there really IS no explanation for the origin of man yet.
Furthermore, I'm tired of people whining about ID not being falsifiable. It is falsifiable, come up with a model that shows how life can happen on its own. Some people are trying to do that. I hear about the research every now and then, so far all it's gotten to was sphere membranes forming on their own, that doesn't explain how DNA and reproduction came about.
Always keep research moving forward, for God sakes. I think it would be wonderful to find that life was planeted here on earth by another species. It would give all of humanity unification, purpose and direction; to "go where no man has gone before":) And hopefully it would put a happy end to this bitter argument, both sides could be satisfied with a rational explanation for this phenomenon we call life.
No, this is not philosophy. You can discover things about the origin of life through scientific exploration. Philosophy only serves as a basis for arguement for or against religion, in particular.
'Other humans on another planet' explains nothing and is irrelevant to ID vs science. If that's true then those other humans had to come from somewhere, which brings us back to the same point we started at - if you say they were designed then its still not falsifiable and therefore ID is still totally unscientific.
Well shit, I guess we should scrap the NASA Origins program because it will explain nothing. Humans being "designed" IS falsifiable. The religious fundamentalists may skirt that issue also because it conflicts with their genesis theory, taken in the literal. In order to falsify it you have to prove that life CAN happen at random, that's the first step anyways. I'm sorry you feel that area of science is such a waste. If they find something other than DNA evolving on some other planet, that would probably explain how life on earth came about. Finding humans on other planets may not be as groundbreaking. After all, we may have put ourselves here and then forgotten about how we got here in the first place. It's still the most significant part of our history and is definately worth investigating.
I don't have anything against religion or religious people, I do have something against fundamentalists who try to impose their beliefs on others through promoting their beliefs as literal fact. In short I hate scammers and fraudsters.
That's great, but that's not what we're talking about here. I'm trying to show you that ID is a valid theory when presented the right way, not using any supernatural events. But you see, going back to the parent, evolution is presented incorrectly just as often, as an explanation for the origin of man, we came from monkeys, which came from the ocean, where life spontaneously erupted billions of years ago. You can try to say that this debate is not proper, and just ignore the question of where life initially started, but this debate takes place everywhere, all the time, and that is how it goes. You place a wall between abiogenesis and evolution, while the two are directly linked to each other.
If you have something against fundamentalists, then you'd better just be careful who you label a fundamentalist. If someone came up with a biology book for students that instead of dedicating an entire section to "Evolution" they dedicated it to "origins" and sub-sections called evolution, abiogenesis, creationism, it would throw the Atheist political activists into an uproar. They're just as guilty of imposing their beliefs on others, and they fit the description of a fundamentalist.
Evolution does not say anything about how life originally came about
Right. You're trying to say that the whole comparison of ID to evolution is moot, but that's what we're comparing here, and as far as origins go, evolution relies on the primordial goo thing, because there is only one other alternative, and it supports ID. If you want to pit ID against evolution, then you have to take origins into account. If you want to say that both can coexist, that is fine, it's probably true, but that's not what I'm talking about here. If I have not gathered your point, then please clarify.
You seriously misunderstand the whole debate...
You are just trying to invalidate my point here. The debate I'm participating in is about the origin of life, our significance in the universe, not the validity of ID or evolution. Furthermore, I think ID can be tested. Your idea of god, the one you're argueing against, may be Jesus Christ, but I have yet to decide that. God could be other humans on another planet. If you prove that DNA exists in other parts of the solar system, you've come a long way to understanding the origin of man. You see, you're participating in a turf war because you've pit yourself against all religious peoples, at least that's what I take from your "The ID side of this debate is proposing something that can never be tested." comment. I wouldn't consider myself a religious person, for the record.
What is wrong with judging the status of science, an evolving, and never finished body knowledge?
Nothing, under the right circumstances. What we have here are a bunch of people calling the football game right after the kickoff. It's all fun and games until someone breaks a blood vessel in their forehead.
I agree, people may be mistakenly giving evolution too much weight, however, I believe it does have predictive power, but doesn't explain the ORIGIN of species at all! It will take a LOT more to prove that life evolved from basic matter, the "primordial goo" hypothesis, is what is full of holes. Life is obviously evolving, it's what CREATED life that interests me, if it created itself, fine, prove it! Come up with a model, hell, come up with any way at all to create artificial life, nanotechnology or whatever, whatever. And then demonstrate that it can happen due to natural processes! We'll see how likely it is to happen "naturally". It would be a perfectly plausible explanation for life existing on earth if it arrived here on a spacecraft 10 million years ago. And then where did it come before that? Uh oh, now we're getting into some serious shit, I think it scares some people. Evolution! That's the answer to everything! Bah.
So I agree with you; the religious fundamentalists and the evolutionists have a lot in common. It's a turf war, an embarassing turf war. They both have something seriously wrong with their brains! I'm glad to know that there are still some sane people that are waiting this one out. I think (hope?) more and more people come to this conclusion, that there is no conclusion to be made yet! I also think its fucking ridiculous that you get modded down, I probably will be also.
Moon base is one thing, I don't see the Chinese, Europeans or anyone else sending probes to Jupiter, Saturn, we're already well on our way to Pluto. Huygens was a nice collaborative effort, but so far all the ESA has done is earth, moon, and sun observation.
Putting people on the moon is easier in some respects than sending a probe to Jupiter. I say China try something unique, how about a race to the nether regions of our solar system? Lets explore these Kuiper belt objects, that seems way more interesting to me than the friggin MOON!
Ugh. You are confusing a gasoline fuel cell with a hydrogen fuel cell. You'll find they are very different things.
No he's not. You linked to a company that sells fuel cells used in automotive racing, which is basically just a high performance gas tank. I assume you mean to find a link to a hydrocarbon based fuel cell. Furthermore, I looked up this "fuel cell ford focus" and it apparently runs on hydrogen.
You really oversimplify things. MySQL isn't faster for some things, I've noticed writes with MySQL are extremely slow, and the query optimizer isn't as good as Oracle. I have become an expert at manually optimizing queries for MySQL, but when I use other databases, Oracle and Sybase mainly, the queries are optimized for me automatically.
I guess you just need to be doing more complex queries and transactions to really appreciate the big commercial databases.
I don't think I've ever created, used or otherwise been a part of any project where the PRODUCTIOn databases required more than 4 gigabytes. I have done developmental things that required tons of space, building production ready tables from a bunch of data I didn't really need.
I'd say the only thing you wouldn't want to use this limited version of Oracle for is some sort of full-text search engine. MySQL supports that and I can see tables growing over 4 gigs if you were searching full pages of text. However, many of the databases I've worked with are on dual-processor machines, with 4 gigs of ram (that seems to be a pretty common configuration for me right now), I don't know if all that ram is ever really used though. I figure in most cases I probably don't use a gig of ram, especially if your data is under 4 gigabytes. You might end up with 200-300 megs of indexes on 4 gigabytes of data.
There is also the crippled version of Sybase, which isn't AS crippled as this Oracle, they're comparable, Oracle may be a bit more advanced, judging from benchmarks I've seen.
... where buddy_id like '%38277%' or buddy_id like '%93882%' or buddy_id like '%1838877' or buddy_id like '%88392%' or buddy_id like '%1827332%' or.....
Yeah, not without a crapload of scripting. I have seen too many databases where the architect originally thought that the fewer tables the better, even if it meant widespread replication. I once worked with a database that was essentially one table. The users login and password was in the main data table, replicated dozens of times in some instances. I ended up turning that one hulking table into 10 or 15 different tables. That is the classic mistake, fewer tables is better. I think it's because they don't know how joins work or something.
Since I can remember Sybase has had a free version of their database. I've always recommended it to all of my clients I do contract work for. Postgres is alright, but it doesn't have the quality feel to it that I get from commercial databases, postgres feels hackish to me. MySQL on the other hand has quality CLI, it's fast, but feature wise it sucks arse. So maybe I'll have something better than Sybase now.
Basically the same as what Sybase developer edition is. I think Oracle is a bit better than Sybase for speed, feature wise it's about the same I'm sure.
Hydrogen bonds are what power automobiles right now, we're talking about compressed hydrogen gas. An ethnol fuel cell stores most of its energy in the form of hydrogen bonds, but that's not what we're talking about, you see.
Why bring NPR into it if the thing that got you was the bush quotes? If NPR was the thing bothering you why bring up the Bush edit as it was not the NPR show? It just comes across to me that you want one to reflect on the other when all it should reflect on is the programming choice of the radio station.
The programming choice of the radio station is exactly my point. Think about it. Other radio stations don't play those same "Bush edits" for listeners to laugh about.
... most collages and non-profits are run, operated, or have boards made up by some of the biggest capitalists I can think of.
Slashdot Mirror
I never said there was no connection between them - that was a straw man you've built up and knocked down quit successfuly.
You said "they have nothing to do with each other". If you can't carry on a cohesive argument, I won't reply further. Quit dancing around and take a shot at me, damn!
ID claims that it can answer the origin of life.
Depending on who you ask, typicall it is only the origin of life on earth. Abiogenesis would be an adequate explanation for life everywhere in the universe. If you want to talk about life in the universe, and a universal creator, then you quit comparing ID to evolution and start comparing it to the big bang theory, because evolution doesn't really explain how the universe got here.
There are many experiments that have tested the theories around QM - see the light-through-a-slit experiments for example which you can do in any high-school science lab. There is still a lot of work surrounding QM because it doesn't fit in with the Einsteinian theory of gravity - ie. there's something missing in our understanding of the universe. Investigating things like this is what science is all about.
According to QM, I could teleport across the universe right now, the chances of that are slim, impossible according to the law of probability, but... that is abiogenesis for you, impossible according to the law of probability. As for the double-slit experiment, it raised more questions than it answered.
I love your matter-of-fact tone, everything you say, even things like "just pointing out that there is no organised movement to interfere with religion by any significant faction of science or scientists", which is completely unfounded. "The converse is not true with a politically significant faction of religious people trying to interfere with science by redefining it to be something its not." I've demonstrated that ID can be falsified using statistics alone, so from my perspective ID proponents are contributing to the realm of science by proposing alternate viewpoints. Interfering with science, that's bullshit, this is a political matchup, as you're well aware. One side uses science as often as it can, the science of being gay, the science of marijuana joints having medical value, whatever, just a bunch of politicians and lawyers trying to get their way if you ask me.
I have no doubt that evolution takes place. At some point in time, people began to accept the warm little pond idea, and championed Darwin for it, but Darwin may have been more skeptical of that if he were still around. He didn't set out to disprove god. I don't see anything in the article argueing against evolution, it just states that evolution doesn't explain the origin of life. I distinctly remember my 7th grade biology teacher having an in-class discussion where he made the claim that life "evolved" from primordial goo. Maybe he was not the best teacher, but you see what is really the issue, who's pushing an agenda?
As per your comments, I don't think it is a philosophical argument, ID, it is a scientific one, which is based on observable phenomena. If you were to lay out a philosophical argument for ID, it would probably go something like this (pardon my lack of decent argument structure):
Is that good enough? Fiddle with the numbers and make random occurance a possibility, and you've shot my argument to hell, or present a possible alternative to random chance. As for the huge number, the number is agreeably large from all the sources I've read, the argument against this is that earth was around for so long enough, with enough diversity in the geology and what not, to provision this random occurance. I can't even speculate the number, but I would hope you agree that it is incredibly slim chances that life evolved on EARTH of all places! Perhaps it happened once, somewhere in the universe, billions, trillions of years ago, and we are just an extension of that civilization. At least that is more probable than the random occurance happening on Earth, but that is a fine explanation for the events described in the Bible if you ask me (people descending from the heavens and what not). I think the Bible is interesting, but I wouldn't consider myself a religious person.
It's strange that these opinions go completely ignored by the scientific community. Here are the interesting parts:
DIFFICULTIES FOR ABIOGENESIS
The previous discussions has shown that there is no special symmetry about life forming DNA or protein that causes that proper DNA or protein sequences to form spontaneously. In addition, there is apparently no special feature in nature that causes DNA or protein structures suited for self-replication to form spontaneously, even in an environment which has energy flowing through it. Thus, it appears that the only natural mechanism left for naturally producing the proper DNA or protein sequences for the 1st replicator is just the pure chance of them forming through random intermingling in a prebiotic soup. This section discusses some of the major difficulties in developing a nucleic acid based cell.
he goes on to site a bunch of specific necessities, with a number of individual estimates that need to be factored into any final calculation. I skimmed over it and didn't see any ridiculously huge numbers, it's almost pointless to slap a number on it, but none the less, there is a number out there...
I can't find many non-religious sources, funny how this area goes completely ignored by mainstream science, there aren't even any rebuttals!
http://intelligentdesign.org/odds/odds.htm
Dr. Emile Borel who first formulated the basic Law of Probability which states that the occurrence of an event where the chances are beyond 1 chance in 1050(the 200th power is used for scientific calculations), is an event which we can state with certainty will never happen, regardless of the time allotted or how many opportunities could exist for the event to take place.
...
Francis Crick, the man who shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins for their discovery of the molecular structure of DNA had this to say about probability factors and protein synthesis: " To produce this miracle of molecular construction all the cell need do is to string together the amino acids (which make up the polypeptide chain) in the correct order. This is a complicated biochemical process, a molecular assembly line, using instructions in the form of a nucleic acid tape (the so-called messenger RNA). Here we need only ask, how many possible proteins are there? If a particular amino acid sequence was selected by chance, how rare of an event would that be? This is an easy exercise in combinatorials. Suppose the chain is about two hundred amino acids long; this is , if anything, rather less than the average length of proteins of all types. Since we have just twenty possibilities at each place, the number of possibilities is twenty multiplied by itself some two hundred times. This is conveniently written 20 200, that is a one followed by 260 zeros! This number is quite beyond our everyday comprehension. For comparison, consider the number of fundamental particles (atoms, speaking loosely) in the entire visible universe, not just in our own galaxy with its 1011 stars, but in all the billions of galaxies, out to the limits of observable space. This number, which is estimated to be 1080, is quite paltry by comparison to 10260. Moreover, we have only considered a polypeptide chain of a rather modest length. Had we considered longer ones as well, the figure would have been even more immense.(Life Itself, its origin and nature, Francis Crick, 1981, pp 51-52) I should mention here that Crick is not a creationist, but his probability numbers for protein synthesis are similar to those of creation scientists.
So there you go, lower estimates in the 1 in 10^200,000 range. A more reasonable estimate would probably be 1 in 10^200,000,000
So personally I think if this happened anywhere in the universe, it was sheer luck that it happened at all, and more likely that the creator-god created us, or at least spawned us from his own, random chance DNA line. I lends serious credibility to the universal designer theory.
"I don't know how it could have happened without design, so it must have been designed"
You could say the same thing about abiogenesis. "I don't know how it could have happened except at random, just one of those 1 in 10^9218891287491824 chance that everything falls into place at random." I'd like to see someone try and compute the odds of life starting at random. Check this out, I googled for this: The Odds
Got something more substantial than just saying that you don't understand it?
I referenced a book. There are many other books on the subject. I've read that one in particular, it was interesting but what I really got from the book was the vastness of unanswered questions on the subject.
By the way, I've never heard of the discovery institute. Intelligent Design has been around for centuries, wasn't it Thomas Aquainas who first rationalized it? Plato also talked about it in Timaeus, but both philosphers were referring to a universal creator, here we're talking about the design of life forms, Plato knew nothing about DNA, Aquinas came closer to what we're talking about, however he had no understanding of life's intricacies either.
Who cares what internal memoranda the Discovery institute passes around. It sounds like they were talking more about sociology, social issues. I think whoever wrote that link you sited makes a lot of sense, regardless of their intent, like I said they didn't invent ID, it's been around for centuries, but a few of the points they make hit home with me; "The social consequences of materialism have been devastating..." I often see science used as a justification for detrimental practices, there is a lot of scientists trying to say marijuana is safe, which may lead to more widespread acceptance, hoever I think more drugs are the last thing society needs. Some people think religion is the worst thing that ever happened to us. It's hard to say since religion has been so prevalent from the beginning of time. I tend to think we would have destroyed ourselves by now if there weren't the influence of religion guiding some people.
Darwin refers to a "warm little pond", I went after the source of this:
I suppose that explains the link between evolution and abiogenesis. It's interesting that Darwin used creationism as a foundation for his theory of evolution.
And in what way can it be presented without using anything supernatural? ... how did they come about?
It is not an answer to everything, simply a disproof of the primordial soup theory. Evolution doesn't answer ALL the questions either though. Perhaps the answer to your question would best be solved through astronomy, or astrophysics. We still don't know where the Universe came from. People who tend to believe life happened at random may also be inclined to believe that the Universe came about for the same reason: none at all. Now purpose, that is a philosophical debate.
Evolution does not explain how life 'erupted' out of the oceans billions of years ago, that is abiogenesis. I don't see how this is such a hard concept to grasp
Are you seriously going to keep repeating this? Go read some of the other posts in this thread and see what everyone is talking about. Holy shit, you might as well be saying "relativity and quantum mechanics have nothing to do with each other". Speaking of which, is quantum mechanics falsifiable? Someone comes up with a huge complex set of equations that happen to work with each other, and it is widely accepted (after years of rejection). Some of it doesn't even make sense!
f someone had a 'biology' book with a section dedicated to creationism then it wouldn't be a biology book anymore - it'd be a religious text. That's what normal rational people get so upset about...
I'm glad you'd consider yourself a normal, rational person, but you may very well be an idiot, if you honestly believe that creationism is religious dogma. RTFA, the text is not referring to any literal truth, nor does it mention ANYTHING about religion! Holy shit man. And if you think scientists aren't trying to impose their beliefs on people, then you truly are an idiot, as I suspected. They may as well just throw every science journal together into one massive book and call it the bible, cause you'd just take it as the word of god wouldn't you?
You need to understand exactly what a theory is, from a philosophical perspective. If I wanted to, I could claim that nothing, not even your own knowledge of yourself, is real knowledge, because it is based on observations you make as a human, which are subject to error. You're taking a similarly radical position when you claim that ID is not falsifiable. In this case you do the best you can to come to a rational conclusion, and many of the foundational questions in science have been answered with weak arguments. You go ask a true skeptic about either of the two topics and he/she will tell you there are two many unknowns at this point, to come to a solid conclusion, whichever side you take. There are a lot of good books on the subject, The Emergence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview, The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup, I've read the latter and recommend it, the former is next on my hit list.
Abiogenesis is about the origin of life. Evolution, technically, is about what happened after life arose on Earth. Life origins studies proceed under a number of hypotheses and remain very tentative during this early period of investigation. A recent summary of research is in The Spark of Life : Darwin and the Primeval Soup by Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada.
Thirdly, the issue here is that they want to teach religion in a science class to further their ideological goals. Inteligent Design should not be given 'fair weight' in a scientific context, as it has nothing but the slimmest scientific backing.
Ahem! I don't hear anything about religion in their wording. It appears as though they are careful not to introduce religion. I find it strange that people make such a huff about this. Abiogenesis is an extremely raw topic, and right now I think Intelligent Design is just about the ONLY theory that makes sense. Primordial goo doesn't make much sense to me, and the research is really incomplete on the primordial goo hypothesis. Read the book.
Furthermore, I'm tired of people whining about ID not being falsifiable. It is falsifiable, come up with a model that shows how life can happen on its own. Some people are trying to do that. I hear about the research every now and then, so far all it's gotten to was sphere membranes forming on their own, that doesn't explain how DNA and reproduction came about.
Always keep research moving forward, for God sakes. I think it would be wonderful to find that life was planeted here on earth by another species. It would give all of humanity unification, purpose and direction; to "go where no man has gone before" :) And hopefully it would put a happy end to this bitter argument, both sides could be satisfied with a rational explanation for this phenomenon we call life.
No, this is not philosophy. You can discover things about the origin of life through scientific exploration. Philosophy only serves as a basis for arguement for or against religion, in particular.
'Other humans on another planet' explains nothing and is irrelevant to ID vs science. If that's true then those other humans had to come from somewhere, which brings us back to the same point we started at - if you say they were designed then its still not falsifiable and therefore ID is still totally unscientific.
Well shit, I guess we should scrap the NASA Origins program because it will explain nothing. Humans being "designed" IS falsifiable. The religious fundamentalists may skirt that issue also because it conflicts with their genesis theory, taken in the literal. In order to falsify it you have to prove that life CAN happen at random, that's the first step anyways. I'm sorry you feel that area of science is such a waste. If they find something other than DNA evolving on some other planet, that would probably explain how life on earth came about. Finding humans on other planets may not be as groundbreaking. After all, we may have put ourselves here and then forgotten about how we got here in the first place. It's still the most significant part of our history and is definately worth investigating.
I don't have anything against religion or religious people, I do have something against fundamentalists who try to impose their beliefs on others through promoting their beliefs as literal fact. In short I hate scammers and fraudsters.
That's great, but that's not what we're talking about here. I'm trying to show you that ID is a valid theory when presented the right way, not using any supernatural events. But you see, going back to the parent, evolution is presented incorrectly just as often, as an explanation for the origin of man, we came from monkeys, which came from the ocean, where life spontaneously erupted billions of years ago. You can try to say that this debate is not proper, and just ignore the question of where life initially started, but this debate takes place everywhere, all the time, and that is how it goes. You place a wall between abiogenesis and evolution, while the two are directly linked to each other.
If you have something against fundamentalists, then you'd better just be careful who you label a fundamentalist. If someone came up with a biology book for students that instead of dedicating an entire section to "Evolution" they dedicated it to "origins" and sub-sections called evolution, abiogenesis, creationism, it would throw the Atheist political activists into an uproar. They're just as guilty of imposing their beliefs on others, and they fit the description of a fundamentalist.
Right. You're trying to say that the whole comparison of ID to evolution is moot, but that's what we're comparing here, and as far as origins go, evolution relies on the primordial goo thing, because there is only one other alternative, and it supports ID. If you want to pit ID against evolution, then you have to take origins into account. If you want to say that both can coexist, that is fine, it's probably true, but that's not what I'm talking about here. If I have not gathered your point, then please clarify.
You seriously misunderstand the whole debate...
You are just trying to invalidate my point here. The debate I'm participating in is about the origin of life, our significance in the universe, not the validity of ID or evolution. Furthermore, I think ID can be tested. Your idea of god, the one you're argueing against, may be Jesus Christ, but I have yet to decide that. God could be other humans on another planet. If you prove that DNA exists in other parts of the solar system, you've come a long way to understanding the origin of man. You see, you're participating in a turf war because you've pit yourself against all religious peoples, at least that's what I take from your "The ID side of this debate is proposing something that can never be tested." comment. I wouldn't consider myself a religious person, for the record.
Nothing, under the right circumstances. What we have here are a bunch of people calling the football game right after the kickoff. It's all fun and games until someone breaks a blood vessel in their forehead.
So I agree with you; the religious fundamentalists and the evolutionists have a lot in common. It's a turf war, an embarassing turf war. They both have something seriously wrong with their brains! I'm glad to know that there are still some sane people that are waiting this one out. I think (hope?) more and more people come to this conclusion, that there is no conclusion to be made yet! I also think its fucking ridiculous that you get modded down, I probably will be also.
Putting people on the moon is easier in some respects than sending a probe to Jupiter. I say China try something unique, how about a race to the nether regions of our solar system? Lets explore these Kuiper belt objects, that seems way more interesting to me than the friggin MOON!
I for one welcome our new Chinese overlords.
No he's not. You linked to a company that sells fuel cells used in automotive racing, which is basically just a high performance gas tank. I assume you mean to find a link to a hydrocarbon based fuel cell. Furthermore, I looked up this "fuel cell ford focus" and it apparently runs on hydrogen.
Come on everybody, Larry Elison just wants to be the richest man in the world just ONCE, let him have his moment! Come on!
Watch for the free Oracle edition ebuild script.
I guess you just need to be doing more complex queries and transactions to really appreciate the big commercial databases.
I don't think I've ever created, used or otherwise been a part of any project where the PRODUCTIOn databases required more than 4 gigabytes. I have done developmental things that required tons of space, building production ready tables from a bunch of data I didn't really need.
I'd say the only thing you wouldn't want to use this limited version of Oracle for is some sort of full-text search engine. MySQL supports that and I can see tables growing over 4 gigs if you were searching full pages of text. However, many of the databases I've worked with are on dual-processor machines, with 4 gigs of ram (that seems to be a pretty common configuration for me right now), I don't know if all that ram is ever really used though. I figure in most cases I probably don't use a gig of ram, especially if your data is under 4 gigabytes. You might end up with 200-300 megs of indexes on 4 gigabytes of data.
There is also the crippled version of Sybase, which isn't AS crippled as this Oracle, they're comparable, Oracle may be a bit more advanced, judging from benchmarks I've seen.
... where buddy_id like '%38277%' or buddy_id like '%93882%' or buddy_id like '%1838877' or buddy_id like '%88392%' or buddy_id like '%1827332%' or .....
Yeah, not without a crapload of scripting. I have seen too many databases where the architect originally thought that the fewer tables the better, even if it meant widespread replication. I once worked with a database that was essentially one table. The users login and password was in the main data table, replicated dozens of times in some instances. I ended up turning that one hulking table into 10 or 15 different tables. That is the classic mistake, fewer tables is better. I think it's because they don't know how joins work or something.
Since I can remember Sybase has had a free version of their database. I've always recommended it to all of my clients I do contract work for. Postgres is alright, but it doesn't have the quality feel to it that I get from commercial databases, postgres feels hackish to me. MySQL on the other hand has quality CLI, it's fast, but feature wise it sucks arse. So maybe I'll have something better than Sybase now.
Basically the same as what Sybase developer edition is. I think Oracle is a bit better than Sybase for speed, feature wise it's about the same I'm sure.
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about.
Hydrogen bonds are what power automobiles right now, we're talking about compressed hydrogen gas. An ethnol fuel cell stores most of its energy in the form of hydrogen bonds, but that's not what we're talking about, you see.
The programming choice of the radio station is exactly my point. Think about it. Other radio stations don't play those same "Bush edits" for listeners to laugh about.
This is bullshit. Nearly every single college out there is liberal, tremendously liberal, I'm talking like 90% liberal staff. There, you think Stanford, the #1 business school in the west, would be more conservative? I mean, damn, you are living in an alternate universe if you honestly believe that! Back up these nonsense comments of yours.